Book Description

Excerpt from The Journal of American Folk-Lore, 1921, Vol. 20 All 's fair in love and war is, perhaps, the most famous, though not the oldest of all proverbs. It is also the most inclusive, for it appeals alike to the founders and to the destroyers of human socie ties. The revelations of our divorce courts and the discussion evoked by such books as Mr. Allen's The Mettle of the Pasture, the cap ture of Aguinaldo and other incidents of the campaign in the Philip pines, and the wiles of party politics throughout the nation furnish striking examples of individual and collective faith in the ethics of this trite saying. The association of war and love in the same adage corresponds, in its rudest and simplest form, to the practice once in vogue among certain Californian Indians of arousing in themselves the proper war mood by singing, Let's go carry off the young women! With many barbarous tribes and peoples in the early stages of civiliza tion wife getting is the motive of innumerable war expeditions and the cause of endless intertribal disputes. Indeed, some author ities have looked on this as the prime reason for war in the begin nings of culture. The rape of the Sabine women, the carrying-off of Helen, and the events chronicled or remembered in Irish legend, English ballad, German fairy-tale, and Slavonic folk-song find their analogues all over the globe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.